Mmmmm, squash

I'm turning one of our precious butternut squash into soup and pudding right now!  The soup is basically the same recipe that I use for zucchini soup: squash, a pear, vegetable broth, curry, salt and pepper, garlic and cream.  Here's the pudding recipe I'm trying:

Pumpkin pudding

Ingredients:

• 1 can (15 ounces) pumpkin puree
• 3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
• 1 1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3 large eggs, slightly beaten
• 1 3/4 cups half-and-half or light cream

Preparation:

Butter a 1 1/2-quart casserole. Heat oven to 350°.

In a large mixing bowl, combine all ingredients and whisk or beat on low speed until blended. Pour into the prepared casserole and bake for 55 to 65 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. If desired, serve with sweetened whipped cream and cinnamon sugar for sprinkling.
In a large mixing bowl, combine all ingredients and whisk or beat on low speed until blended. Pour into the prepared casserole and bake for 55 to 65 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. If desired, serve with sweetened whipped cream and cinnamon sugar for sprinkling.

This recipe is from here:  http://southernfood.about.com/od/pumpkins/r/pumpkin-pudding.htm

The Bike Rack’s Maiden Voyage

After getting an old bike rack from our neighbors’ yard sale last year, we finally strapped it on the car’s roof rack, heaved the bike into position and took her for a spin. The test trip around the block seemed promising, so we took it for a longer ride. Racing along the Autobahn, performing the slalom maneuvers that my esteemed driver usually does, all seemed well. Until we neared Chemnitz. There was a VW that my esteemed driver was just burning to pass, and as he attempted the pass, there was a crash. The bike went down. Fortunately, it was hanging by a thread on our roof, and we had to work our way from the left across 3 lanes of traffic to the right shoulder. We were lucky there was a sort of a turnout leading to a field close by our incident, so we didn’t have to drive the next 5 kilometers to the next gas station with my precious bike teetering from the roof hanging only by its' lock. Everything was fine, I unlocked the bike, we lifted it down and checked all its parts, no damage but a little scrape had been done. The car got a new dent, but with all the other dents from its' various accidents, you won’t notice one more. The thing that suffered the most was the roof rack, or more precisely, the bike rack part of the roof rack. The track the bike stands on was bent all to heck, but fortunately for us, it is of such low quality that we could simply bend it back to a position vaguely similar to its original position. The only thing that hasn’t yet been repaired are my nerves, but that’ll go away soon enough.

More Prague Pictures

Here are some more sights from Prague. First, the fantastic peeing men statue. Below you can see some details of my favorite architectural style: Art Nouveau!

Sunday Lunch in Prague

A few weeks ago we had visitors from North America, and I was lucky enough to accompany them to Prague. Because I had to work on Monday, I couldn’t stay overnight in Prague with them, but did go for the day on Sunday. Despite the poor weather, we still had a colourful time. Some pictures:

We didn’t have lunch at Hooters, though I would have felt at home there! We wanted to have some Czech food, not delicious fries. I’ve been to Hooters before in Michigan, and the food isn’t exactly gourmet, but at least the service is friendly. My son was enthused!

Admittedly, my lunch (tortellini with spinach filling) wasn’t that Czech after all, but the appetizer was: battered, deep fried cheese! A delectable treat, and quite filling. I didn’t even have Czech beer as you can see in the picture, I had water. But at least my guests had something traditional: goulash!

Those are not nachos

It's almost a tradition of sorts that I get ice cream with the kids if we walk to the garden in the afternoon. Everyone is tired, needs a bit of sugar, and some delicious ice cream is just the right thing to get at the halfway point of the trip. This time I spotted a very special item at the store, and Kid 1 was also very enthused to try these delicious things. To me, these are tacos, but some confused soul at the Gut & Günstig company (Good-n-cheap is how I'd translate that, though a marketing manager may not like that translation because günstig isn't just cheap, it's a good deal...) named these tasty treats "Nacho". If I'm not mistaken, a nacho is actually a tortilla or taco chip served together with various fantastic toppings and sauces, often with melted cheese on top. This in no way resembles a nacho, not even a desert nacho. These scrumptious snacks are most definitely ice cream tacos, a taco being a tortilla shell folded around the filling. Nachos are not folded. Their origin is also from a tortilla, but a tortilla cut into triangles, making it too small to fold around anything.
























I was hungry for some salty comfort food on this particular trip to the store, so instead of snacking on false nachos, I hit the chip aisle. I considered getting actual nacho chips, but much to my delight, I found something that not only looks, but also tastes like Sun Chips! Sun Chips are mouth watering whole grain chips. I've always been puzzled about the lack of Sun Chips here in Germany, because this seems to be such a whole grain loving place. But maybe the whole grain lovers are not so much the chip lovers...
Anyway, on my junk food shopping spree I almost lost my appetite, because I could just feel the other shoppers' eyes burning holes of disdain into my back. The English-speaking fat American is plying her kids with junk food one hour before dinner time! Little did they know, we'd already walked about a kilometer and a half with another kilometer and a half to go. Rather than feel too guilty, I paid and promptly tore open the false nachos gave each kid one right there in the entryway of the supermarket. Take that.









And yet, despite all the "fat American" jokes that course the streets, there's one sinful treat that you can get here that I've never seen in my home country: that would be sweetened condensed milk in a tube. For what reason do you need sweetened condensed milk in a tube? Let me tell you, gentle readers. Not for baking, not for your coffee, no, a can of sweetened condensed milk is good enough for that. This is for the kids huddled on street corners like crack addicts who suck the stuff straight from the tube. Yes, I've seen it with my own eyes. Children and grown ups alike, sucking sweetened condensed milk straight from the tube. At least I have the self-respect to eat the stuff from a spoon behind closed doors!

BRN!

This weekend was the BRN, the Bunte Republik Neustadt festival, here in my neighborhood. I've been away from Dresden on the BRN weekend for the last 5 years due to other commitments, but this year I stayed on board and even took on a fun project: I organized a stand for the non-profit organization that sponsors our Kinderhaus, cocolores e.V. Now, all of you know how I love our Kinderhaus, so it was a pleasure for me to do this very big job.



















Here's a picture from behind the scenes at our stand: you can see the table, the coffee, the delicious cake and the happy visitors!



















Here's a view down the street where we had our stand, Talstrasse. Talstr. is known as being the children's street of the BRN, but I like it there the best because it has the neatest stands. It's not only stuff for kids, but also creative cooks who only take donations for their food, people with vegan sushi like the guys next to us, and the physicist Rocket Ulf who shoots empty pop bottles, rolls of toilet paper and other objects high into the air. We were lucky to have a roof over our heads, because Rocket Ulf's rockets kept coming down right on us. A friend of mine even set up a table on this street with an "Unprofessional Tailor Shop": an iron, a sewing machine, some fabric and buttons and sewed things on people's clothes like flowers, buttons, pockets, whatever they desired for free! That's the spirit!























Here are the guys at our stand building a giant marble run...or as one viewer of this picture said, "There's the engineer solving world hunger while the two managers drink coffee". The marble run was definitely a favorite for the crowd, the kids and adults loved it. One kid even showed up with a giant tin of marbles and just went nuts. My kid also lost it when he saw the giant marble run. I think somebody at my house might get a room-size marble run for their next birthday...

Like I said, it's been a while since I've been at a BRN. It's something I have mixed feelings about anyway. The first time I heard of it, it sounded great, almost like a giant, quirky, neighborhood flea market, with the people in the neighborhood coming out of their apartments, bringing tables and chairs out onto the street, eating and drinking and doing fun projects together. But when I saw it, it didn't look so much like this, except on Talstrasse and a few other little corners and alleys. To me the rest of the BRN looked like any other street festival: loud music, food stands, stands selling t-shirts, clothes, jewelry, and of course, beer. Oh, yeah, and aggressive neo-Nazis and anti-fascists and police in riot gear. Nothing too surprising, nothing horrifying, but certainly not at all like the warm, fuzzy, artsy event that had been described to me. This year was at least peaceful. There were still loads of police everywhere, but not in riot gear. You could talk to them like normal people, I had to ask about driving in on Saturday morning to haul the tables and stuff for the stand. They weren't weird like they had been in earlier years, and they had normal uniforms on. They also weren't so militant about searching every bag, pocket and crevice that entered the festival area for glass bottles as they had been in earlier years. I think this led to a more relaxed atmosphere. I didn't hear about any riots and there were no helicopters hovering overhead constantly, even on Saturday night. Late Saturday night the most annoying things were the mingling stench of urine and the aroma of the food stands along with all the staggering drunks on the streets.

Most of the live music on offer didn't really tickle my fancy, some of the DJs were playing tunes that I like, but dancing isn't so much my thing. My favorite spectacle from Saturday night was "Balkon Rap", some guys rapping from a balcony. These guys were obviously having a lot of fun, they had a giant crowd, and rapping from a balcony has this weird reference to political leaders giving propaganda speeches from their little balconies and yet, it's rap! That has a flair that I like. It was cool.

So, in the end, what it comes down to is that the BRN once again didn't change my life with its more or less nonexistant warm-and-fuzziness, it wasn't horrible, our stand was great, and I really liked Talstrasse as I always do. There were some very neat ideas and activities on offer, and masses and masses of lame, run-of-the-mill stuff. So I guess there was something for everyone. But I'll do it again next year, because it was fun to see the twinkle in older people's eyes when they saw our potato printing project, I loved watching the kids just go crazy for the marble run, giving people cake always makes my day (especially when repeat customers gobble up an entire batch of real American brownies still warm from the oven in 15 minutes!!!), and I'll take any chance I get to tell people how great the Kinderhaus is in a heartbeat.

Food, food and more food

I'm up to my ears in herbs, strawberries and lettuce!


















Not that I'm complaining about getting a heaping bowl of delicious strawberries every day I go to the garden. Certain kids in my household are also not too disturbed by this. One of them will only eat butter at present, the other could most likely fuel himself solely on strawberries. As quickly as I can pick them, the strawberry eater eats them! Plain, with cream and sugar, straight from the plant still sprinkled with dirt, it doesn't matter! They are delicious!























The cress was ready a couple weeks ago so I harvested it, this is only a fraction of the total amount. I made soup:


















This was a nice cream soup with some crunchy homemade croutons. I also made cress pesto, very tasty on bread with cream cheese or pasta. The final product that we ate two days in a row and that was my favorite cress dish of all was salad, featuring cress, roquefort cheese, pear, white wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper.
And then there was the spinach:


















This is also just a mere fraction of the piles and piles of spinach that I had. The most delicious way of eating this was washing the daylights out of it to get the sand off and cooking it for a maximum of 3 minutes and just chowing down. Yum. I also made spinach lasagna with a significant portion of it, which is a tried and true favorite. There's another spinach recipe that I was too lazy to try, because it involved a few steps after the 3 minutes of cooking and I was hungry. It's a Turkish creamed spinach dish with dill, which would have been possible, because I am also practically swimming in dill. Dill quark, dill cream cheese, dill everything! One of these days, I will make the dill spinach, maybe even tomorrow. The fridge, freezer and windowsill are brimming with dill!

Today I had massive amounts of basil at my disposal, so I whipped up some pesto this evening. For that I threw some basil, olive oil, salt, pepper, almonds and a few garlic cloves into the blender, blended the heck out of it, and yummy green pesto came out. I can't wait for lunch tomorrow! I'll probably have it for breakfast, too :-)

Our lettuce is also getting ready to harvest, in fact, we harvested one head of butterhead lettuce today. It may be bibb lettuce, but I'm not up to speed on the specific types of lettuce. Anyway, my German chef simply tore it up, squeezed on some lemon and sprinkled in a bit of sugar, and voila! A tasty salad was made. The only thing that slightly freaked me out was that it was a bit crunchy, and I couldn't discern if the crunching was the sugar or sand. Unidentifiable crunching in my food really freaks me out, call it oversensitivity or a sensory processing disorder, it has seriously disturbed me since I was a kid.

But now, the real work comes in. I have to start learning some new tricks, because the above mentioned foods are all things I have some measure of experience with. What do I do with the other herbs like melissa? I know I can make tea out of it, is there anything else? How do I store it? What about lavender? Can I make soap? Should I make sachets? How in the world do I store oregano, thyme, rosemary, savory, marjoram...? Freeze or dry? In talks with more experienced gardeners, I was advised today to definitely dry the marjoram and thyme.

The herbs are harmless and take up little space. What in the hell are we going to do with all of the potatoes? We have a giant field of potatoes. Who's going to cook all of the tomatoes into tomato sauce? We'll need another freezer if we're going to make that much sauce. Not to mention the countless varieties of peppers, yellow, normal, hot...


















In other news, our little tarpaper shack got a new roof this past week. It looks fancy! I was distressed last weekend when the boys went to town tearing off the old roof, and could walk through the door and look up and see nothing but sky. This week a certain someone worked from dawn to dusk, all alone except the last 2 days when we also had some most excellent helpers, and put on a beautiful new roof.

That's all from the garden front. This thing that was a hairbrained scheme in March has turned into an all-consuming epic. Maybe in the fall or winter I'll write about something else again :-) Or maybe next weekend, who knows.

"We'll put the toilet in the kitchen"

What garden could be complete without a dwarf? I love dwarfs and trolls and the like, and am now the proud owner of 2. This one came with the garden. I purchased my first dwarf in 2004 at the flea market.


















Last weekend we discovered this asparagus peeking out of the sand behind the cottage. Yes! Asparagus! Today while watering the plants I spotted 3 more little stalks sprouting.


















Behold the blossoms on the blueberry bush! I can't wait to eat the blueberries!




































Here are 2 sections of the vegetable garden with spinach, leeks, dill, radishes and probably some other stuff that I'm forgetting. In the background you can see the little shack. From the outside it looks okay, but the inside...we still have a lot of work to do.


















The quince tree is just lovely right now.



















All those blossoms on the cherry tree are now turning into little sweet cherries, yay!


















The strawberries are blossoming like mad and are also producing some little berries already!


















After I thought I'd transplanted all the flower bulbs from the lawn, these little guys pop up and contradict me. A garden is always full of surprises.

It seems like the previous owners of our garden really did gardening the last time in 2006. While reorganizing the cottage and getting the little room ready to set up a kitchen I started rifling through a box of GDR gardening books. At the bottom of the box was a folder with "Personal thoughts about the garden 2006". I thought this might make for some interesting reading, and did it ever! Not only was the work plan for the garden neatly typed out for 2005 and 2006, but there were also notes about other "Gartenfreunde" ("Garden friends", this is how people address each other in the garden colony. Maybe you're "Gartenfreund Smith" and I'm "Gartenfreund Leser".)
There weren't many scathing notes about others, but one of my favorites was about how "A Gartenfreund bitched at us for driving down path XY. He was stupid!"
The quote of the year for 2005 was neatly typed at the end of the personal thoughts for 2005: "We'll put the toilet in the kitchen."

My Victory Garden

This is something I never knew about before, but something like the German "Schrebergarten" also existed in the United States during the World Wars. The US government asked citizens to plant gardens and grow at least some of their own food in order to have more available for troops overseas. The garden club where we now have our garden in Dresden was founded just after World War 2, the former airport of sorts and later illegal dump was parcelled off and leased to the hungry Dresdners so that they could grow some food. I read one account from one of the first gardeners in our club, they couldn't start planting things right away, first they had to clean up their parcel, remove things like tar paper, wire, building debris, bricks. Even worse, they had no water to water their plants once they were able to start gardening. They had to schlep it from Königsbrücker Straße, which is a bit of a hike.


















This is our victory garden just after we got it about 4 weeks ago. The cottage was most likely built in the 60's, during the GDR, and upon closer inspection, you can see that it is cobbled together of the simplest materials. The roof is a hodge podge of different sized boards. Whoever built the place worked hard to even collect all the necessary building materials. In the before picture above, you can see almost how the place looked when we got it. The only things missing are all of the junk that filled up 2 dumpsters and the lawn furniture strewn about the front yard. I'd already transported the useable stuff behind the house.


















Here's how the place looks now, 4 weeks later. We couldn't imagine all of the nice plants that would start popping out of the ground as spring sprung. There are a lot of flowers (roses, peonies, tulips, hyacinths, different kinds of lilies, and lots that I don't know the names of), herbs (lavender and chives), bushes (currants, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries) and fruits and vegetables (strawberries, rhubarbs and today we discovered asparagus!) already there, the beds and the plants just need to be cleaned up and transplanted to fit our vision for the garden. New beds also need to be dug and prepared, since we are required to (and want to) grow fruits and vegetables on a certain portion of the land.
The original plan was to simply plow the place and plant some seeds, but after it became clear what a great selection of existing plants there was, we started transplanting and carefully cleaning up.
So, what's the victory in my victory garden? Obviously I'm not farming for any war efforts. First, it's a victory for my kids. They can wallow in the dirt and get crud under their fingernails just like I did as a kid. They can simply be kids with no TV, no computer, no iPod, no CD player, no room full of toys... They just have lots of space, dirt, plants, snail shells, worms and other assorted creepy crawlies to indulge in. It's definitely a victory against boredom and getting stir crazy at home in our little tiny place. The trip to the garden is a nice 30 minute walk or a short bike ride, there's enough space for everybody to do their own thing if necessary, and oh, is there ever LOTS to do. There's something very satisfying and relaxing for me about pulling quack grass and dandelions. It's a victory for my nerves. I am so fried at the end of the week that it's nice to be able to absolutely switch gears, go someplace quiet, and do something very different. And of course the clearest victory of all: the delicious treats we will soon be harvesting!

What a difference a day makes

Today I documented our walk to the garden. Someone has already put some graffiti on the wall in front of the new daycare where the teacher we had at our first wildly failed attempt at childcare now works.



















Here's the Garnisonkirche, built between 1893 and 1900 with a Catholic and an Evangelical wing in Dresden-Albertstadt to serve the military, which was based in this part of the city. This building is so giant and just fascinates me, I adore it. My son thinks it's a castle and got mad when I told him it's a church.























It looks like someone got interrupted while working on this masterpiece.


















Here's the addition that's going on to the Military History Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind. From this angle it looks tiny, later I'll post another picture from a different angle where it looks shockingly immense.



































I thought this was a nice ensemble, near the entrance to the Military History Museum.























We like to call this "Freedom is not Free" , it's actually a Soviet war memorial that used to stand on Albertplatz a bit to the south during GDR times. In 1993 it was moved here, in front of the Military History Museum.



















After a bit of a jaunt, we reached our little dump. It's starting to look a bit more cheerful, the cherry tree is in bloom and we decorated the quince tree with Easter eggs yesterday. My project for today was to clean up under the quince tree (on the right), transfer some flower bulbs to the new flower bed and transfer some strawberry plants from in front of the house to the strawberry patch I weeded yesterday. Other projects for today involved preparing a patch for sowing some more delicious vegetables like spinach and leeks and planting potatoes.



















As you can see, we were successful. The flowers have been transplanted, and next to the flowers are where the spinach and leek seeds went in!


















These guys were transplanted last weekend.























Here are my strawbs next to the rhubarb that our neighbor gave us. It looks like I'll need to learn how to make quince jelly and rhubarb cake, because I sure don't know what the heck else to do with the stuff!


















Ooooh, I can't wait until these pretty little guys turn into delicious sweet cherries! I know just what I'll do with them, camp out under the tree and eat them straight from the tree!


















It seems that this year, my luck is taking a different shape. A couple years ago, I found over 30 four leaf clovers starting April 1, this year it seems that we'll be finding lucky mushrooms (Glückspilze, in Germany mushrooms are a symbol of good luck). My friendly gardener called me excitedly shortly before we left this afternoon to show me this lovely morel, a fine delicacy where I come from. We plucked it, carefully transported it home, sliced it up, fried it in butter and ate it with dinner. Mmmm. Let's see what kind of luck this brings.

Future Slumlords

One person called it integration, lots of friends find it very cool, I don't quite know what to think of the fact that we are now owners of a little dump of a cottage and a 560 square meter parcel of garden space in a garden club not too far from where we live.



















This is a view back toward the Military Museum from on top of the dump.
Good thing we can walk to the garden from where we live, because our car's been in the shop for nearly 4 weeks. So much for importing a stupid American girly-car! Good luck getting parts. It's actually a very pleasant and scenic walk, even though it doesn't seem too enticing at first glance. You leave our house, cut through the IKEA ghetto that is the Obere Neustadt, go past the imposing Garnissonskirche, cut through the park in front of the Military Museum and gape at the currently under construction Daniel Libeskind addition, cross the big loud busy street, pass the supermarket where you can pick up whatever provisions you could possibly need, from grilling items to fresh sauerkraut to delicious crunchy garlic pickles, pass some more military buildings on the left where there are signs that say "Do not enter, guns are used here" and can peer in and see all kinds of cool tools of destruction, from helicopters to tanks to rockets (the kids are always impressed), cross the bridge over the train tracks (also exciting for the kids if a train comes), and then, here's the really cool part, cut through the dump. The dump is no longer in use, leave it up to Dresden to turn a dump into a park. It's actually pretty nice and quiet, you don't even realize you are smack dab in the middle of the city (and on top of a dump) up there because you are elevated and the noise of the city is very far away. There are paths, meadows, often people are up there flying kites or having picnics, not to mention enjoying the great view. After exiting the dump, we go through a little gate and we are immersed in the joy that is our Kleingartenverein (Small Garden Club). Actually, there are two. On the left are the old Stasi workers' gardens, they are bigger and better equipped. On the right is the garden for everybody else. There are nearly 1000 parcels in our club, it's like a giant parallel universe. When you go for a walk in there you can't see the end of the place or anything else for that matter. You don't feel like you're in the city any more, you feel like you are in some quaint little village with nicely cut little plots of land and tiny little pink houses everywhere. But I'm getting ahead of myself.


















Here's a view out over our garden club from on top of the dump.


















Here's a view back toward downtown, again from the dump.


















And there it is, our own little slum. This place is in disrepair, the previous owner inherited it from his aunt who just got too old to really keep up the garden. Well, the nephew had no desire to. You can see the remnants of what was once a very chic garden that was tended with great pride, remainders of curving walkways among rose- and lavender bushes, carefully arranged trees, berry bushes and chives coming up that suggest a well-tended herb patch of summers past. This is all just talk of the garden. The house, oh the house. To put it simply: all the junk and stuff that was strewn about the garden and piled high in the house (and is not shown in the picture because it's already been hauled off or moved to the back part--like the tipped over yard swings, the grills, the bricks, the stones, a giant pile of sandstone...) filled a dumpster to the brim. We didn't pitch everything, we kept the useable items and the neighbors took some stuff. Somebody took the sandstones the guy had been using to build a terrace without a permit, somebody else took the mouse-poo-ridden sofa for their dog to sleep on. Oh, yeah, and the previous owner staked the place out, waited until we were gone and the neighbors were gone to slip in and take a bunch of stuff after his grace period had ended. You see, he'd been kicked out and owed the club money.

That's just the junk. Did I mention the roof? It's sagging. It looks sort of like a horse's back, if you want to picture that. After clearing the house out, my trusty handyman started to tear out the plastic lining that acted as a ceiling and stinky yellow water just poured down like a smelly rainshower. The good thing is that there's a stove that we could fire up to start drying the place out. It's got wet walls, but we've torn out the wallpaper and are airing the place out as much as we can. We're also having a visit from a roofing expert in the family this weekend to hatch a repair plan.

Then there's the water. Last weekend we tried our luck, Handy Man ventured into the 2 meter deep hole where the water can be turned on and off, and we established that when on, water sprays all around the line on the outside of the house.

We were prepared for this, I would say. We consciously didn't purchase some expensive chic-y garden because we didn't want to just take on somebody else's ideas. The plan was to make this our own, and oh, will we ever. This place also certainly has its advantages. It's on the edge of the club, giving us fewer neighbors and a view of something else other than the other gardens. Plus we've got a quince tree, a cherry tree and an apple tree, not to mention tons of annual flowers, plants and herbs and berry bushes. It just all needs to be moved around a bit so that we can also fulfill the requirement of actual fruit and vegetable cultivation on a certain portion of the garden. I've already been busy transferring flower bulbs. The little house is also bigger than you may build them now.

A little about the history of this place: in earlier times the area where the gardens are now was used as a type of airport. After World War 2, it was cleared and converted into garden parcels so that the starving population could have a plot of land and grow their food.

I like to see this as my start on a long career of being a slum lord. You see, I have a penchant for old houses, especially ones in disrepair. Plus, my parents actually thought that a garden club was a place for poor people to live, something like the trailer parks in the United States. This is my starter house. Next comes my first villa, then my second...

Oh no.

What can we do to run this pest out of town?


















Being the immature imbecile that I am, I cracked up loudly after spotting this one, most likely to the pure disgust of lots of other mothers who were out with their kids enjoying the sun last weekend :-)